


An unexpectedly tender evening

by doomed_spectacles



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Banter, Cuddling & Snuggling, Established Relationship, Ficlet, Fluff, Fluff and Humor, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), Innuendo, Love Potion/Spell, M/M, Potions Accident, all cuddling is consensual, gone slightly awry, trying to spice up your relationship with your snake husband, what could go wrong
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-08
Updated: 2020-06-08
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:07:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24599500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doomed_spectacles/pseuds/doomed_spectacles
Summary: Aziraphale and Crowley try to spice up their evening, with a little help from a potion concocted by an ancient snake-loving sect of humans. What could possibly go wrong?Or,The One Where Aziraphale Pulls a Rachel.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 17
Kudos: 124
Collections: The Sticky Stigma





	An unexpectedly tender evening

**Author's Note:**

> All thanks and/or blame for this goes to the GO-events server. :)
> 
> As noted in the summary, what little "plot" exists here is lifted from/inspired by that one episode of Friends.
> 
> Thanks a ton to @losyanya for the beta!

"I don't feel anything."

"Well perhaps give it some time, dear." Aziraphale took off the little round spectacles he didn’t need and set them next to the open book on his desk. It was neither the largest nor the oldest book on the cluttered surface, but it had been the subject of his intense focus for roughly three hours this evening and several evenings prior.

Crowley paced. He prowled the bookshop, hands in pockets, picking out volumes at random and not really reading them, before putting them back. Aziraphale watched him carefully. Crowley had been known to move items on the shelves while he wasn’t looking, just to be a pain in Aziraphale’s arse. He’d once managed to reorganize an entire shelf by color while Aziraphale had gone to fetch more wine.

“Where did you say you found this concoction again?”

“I believe the region this particular sect originated from is currently referred to as Turkey.” Aziraphale folded his hands on his belly and watched Crowley slink from one corner of the shop to the other. He couldn’t tell if the hip-swinging on display was purposefully exaggerated for his benefit or not. It was hard to tell with those demonic joints. 

“A number of texts concerning the, well,  _ peculiar _ properties of snakes made their way into my collection." Aziraphale cleared his throat. "This is from one of those."

Crowley stopped slinking. He sidled to the couch and perched one slender hip on the edge, leaning the rest of his weight against the ancient settee at an improbable angle. 

“The passive voice is doing some pretty heavy lifting in that sentence, angel,” he said, with a mischievous tilt of one eyebrow.

Aziraphale pursed his lips.

The rest of Crowley’s body joined his hip on the settee. He oozed across the length of the very old cushion and rested his head in hand. Both of his eyebrows lifted in a look Aziraphale had received hundreds of times through the years, and had wiped off Crowley’s face several dozen times since the world had deigned not to end.

“Regardless of the source of the text,” Aziraphale said, “I do believe you should be feeling something by now. Are you sure there’s nothing different? Peculiar sensations, perhaps? Untoward thoughts?” He replaced the spectacles on his nose and peered down them at Crowley. 

"No more than usual." Crowley smirked. “Are you sure you got the ratio of ingredients right?”

Aziraphale gave him a withering look. He’d summoned a very precise kitchen scale of the sort used by the best chefs in Britain. It was joined on the low table in front of the settee by several vials of goo in varying colors, a mortar and pestle covered in yellow residue, and the stems of several types of flowers.

“Hey, you said this was an ancient recipe from a forgotten religious sect that liked to get freaky with snake venom until they all died, so forgive me for double checking.” Crowley positioned himself on his side pressed against the back of the sofa and patted the spot in front of him. “Come here and examine me, why don’t you,” he said with a waggle of his eyebrows.

“Only too happy to oblige, my dear.” 

The settee found itself adjusting in size to accommodate both an angel and the demon wrapped around him, but just barely. Aziraphale perched on the edge of the cushion in front of Crowley, who wrapped both arms and legs around him, squeezing tight.

“Are you sure you’re not feeling anything?” Aziraphale found himself surrounded by Crowley’s long limbs. He stroked the demon’s arm fondly, and wondered, not for the first time, if this was what it felt like to be enveloped by a serpent. The thought wasn’t as worrying as it might’ve been.

“Just, ah, the normal things,” Crowley said. He pressed the side of his face against Aziraphale’s neck and left it there. There was hardly any part of Crowley not squeezed tight against Aziraphale’s body, but instead of thrusting his hips or biting his neck, Crowley simply held him close. 

“Well, perhaps this particular potion was a dud. Can’t win them all, I suppose.”

“Mmmm,” Crowley murmured into Aziraphale’s shoulder.

“Too bad, but there's plenty of other things we can try.” He shifted in Crowley’s arms, gently adjusting the demon's forearm so that his pocket watch was no longer digging into his belly. “Including a few more ancient cults that liked to, as you say, get freaky.”

“Mmmmm. Weird that it didn’t work, though. Some of those circles humans like to draw actually do summon demons. I knew a guy who was in the middle of a presentation to Beelzebub and got summoned to a teenager’s birthday party.”

“Indeed. Well, let’s cross it off the list, shall we?”

Aziraphale extracted himself from Crowley’s grip and returned to the desk. He picked up the book, but before he could close it, found himself being grabbed from behind. Crowley again wound his arms around Aziraphale’s middle and pressed his front to Aziraphale’s back. He laid his head on Aziraphale’s shoulder and squeezed him tight. Aziraphale smiled. He kissed the top of Crowley’s head, relishing the familiar scent of his expensive hair product.

“My dear,” Aziraphale said, “this is lovely, but I’d like to mark the list if this one didn’t work.” He could see but couldn't reach the folio where they'd both jotted down ideas for activities to try while their mutual retirement lasted.

Crowley’s response was a muffled groan into his shoulder.

“All right then.” He set down the book and patted Crowley’s arm, still wrapped tight around his middle. Crowley stroked his hip gently. Aziraphale closed his eyes and enjoyed the feeling of having the demon wrapped around him. The grandfather clock in the backroom ticked softly. People’s voices drifted in from the street, muffled by the heavy curtains Aziraphale had summoned to draw across the windows shortly after Armageddon, when he’d discovered the need for more privacy than at any other point in the bookshop’s history.

One of Crowley’s arms released him. He heard the pages of the book rustle as Crowley paged through it.

“Angel.”

“Yes, dear?”

“You know these pages are stuck together.”

“Hmm?”

“The pages, they're stuck together.”

Aziraphale opened his eyes. Crowley was rubbing two of the old, thin pages between his fingers carefully. They peeled apart. 

“Oh dear.”

“Angel,” Crowley said, his voice flat. He was still flush against Aziraphale’s back, rubbing light circles into his hip with one hand. He spoke with his chin on Aziraphale's shoulder. He was pressed so close Aziraphale could feel the words rumbling in the demon's chest as he spoke. “You made the potion with the ingredients from the next recipe in the book, not the sex one.”

“Oh my.” Aziraphale closed the book.

“What does it say? I can't read whatever language the freaky ancient Turks used.”

“Umm.”

“Angel.”

“Let’s have a seat, my dear,” Aziraphale said. “Then we’ll get sorted.” He stepped back to the settee, dragging Crowley with him in a strange facsimile of a dance. Once seated, he found himself with a lapful of demon. Crowley straddled him, locking his ankles around Aziraphale’s back. He must’ve dared the sofa to be large enough to do so. Aziraphale flushed. He recalled sitting in this exact position not too long ago, but with decidedly fewer items of clothing. He cleared his throat.

“I really must apologize, Crowley. In my haste to assemble the ingredients for this, ah, experiment, I didn’t realize the pages-”

“Just tell me, so we can try to find an antidote,” Crowley said. He’d pressed the side of his face against the side of Aziraphale’s again and was rubbing against it the way a cat rubs against the side of an ankle.

“I don't know that there will be one, you see.”

“So it's like the sex potion?” Crowley asked. “You just have to ride it out?”

“It seems so.”

Crowley rubbed lazy circles on Aziraphale’s shoulder blades, drawing meaningless patterns with his lean fingers. Aziraphale sighed, relaxing into the embrace. He placed his hands on Crowley’s hips and held him close.

“Darling,” Aziraphale said, “you know I consider you to be incredibly tempting and generally quite cunning.”

“Mmm, yeah. Sexy too, I hope.”

“You know that's the case, yes.” Aziraphale cleared his throat. “So I do hope your ego isn't terribly affronted-”

“Wot? My ego is fine, I can take it, whatever it is. No ego here, very humble demon, I am.”

“Well my humble demon,” Aziraphale said, “I’m afraid you have taken a rather potent, ah, snuggle potion, as it were." 

Crowley's hands stilled.

"I suppose I should have known when the called-for ingredients didn't include any known aphrodisiacs."

Crowley's head dropped heavily onto Aziraphale's shoulder.

"This one is called 'The Serpent's Tender Embrace.' It sounds … lovely, if not exactly what we were intending."

Crowley breathed in, then let his breath out in an unmistakable hiss.

"The book says it had a variety of uses. Young people who wanted to be close to one another but were too shy to ask and too young to ... _well_. And elders who enjoyed the sensation of intimacy but weren’t up for the, ah, vigorousness of other activities.”

The bookshop was silent.

Crowley held Aziraphale tightly, clutching at his back.

“Aziraphale.”

“Yes, dear?”

“Next time we try something like this, you're taking the potion.”

Aziraphale smiled, holding the demon as closely as he was being held.

“That's a fair cop.”

**Author's Note:**

> [say hi on Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/doomed-spectacles)


End file.
